Saturday morning non-domesticated animal pictures

I will get back to Sheba eventually, I promise. But first: a report on the state of the local wildlife.

I usually get one hummingbird sighting every year, and that happened earlier this week. It flew away before I could adjust the camera settings, but the pictures would have been shaky blurs photographed from a distance anyway, so you're not missing much. However, I have a picture of a white-lined sphinx moth (Hyles lineata), which hovers in air sort of like a hummingbird and is therefore, to my mind, every bit as good as a hummingbird.

This particular individual was hiding in one of the plants on a day when I had to bring them in for the night, and then I got to chase it around the plant room, kitchen, and living room for what felt like a very long time, before I managed to catch it and take it outside. It then hung on the mouth of the container for quite a while, having exhausted itself trying to fly through windows and clear plastic walls for fifteen minutes. Which meant I got some more or less decent pictures.

The green tree frogs (Hyla versicolor) continue to appear all over the property; 2013 is definitely the Year of the Green Tree Frog.¹ There was also, briefly, a pickerel frog (Rana palustris), who lived in the Portulaca / Tagetes bed for about a week and then moved on.

Rana palustris.
There is also a strong case to be made for 2013 as the Year of the Wasp,² the Year of the Caterpillar, or the Year of the Black Bees, but the frogs feel a lot more noteworthy. Or at least a lot more suddenly abundant, at least.

And yes, this is the same species as the solid-green frogs in the earlier posts. They can apparently choose to be solid green or gray-and-green. So that whole spiel from Kermit about how hard it is to be green: bullshit. He could just be gray, if green is so tough. What a whiner.
It's also been a good year for jumping spiders, though surprisingly light on any other spiders. Usually by this point in the year, I've seen a few black and yellow garden spiders (Argiope aurantia), but this year there's nothing.

Arachnophobes should start scrolling down really quickly . . . NOW.

RAWWWWRRRR!

(Oh, it's over here? Okay then.) RAWWWWRRRR!

This is the most adorable spider I have ever seen. It's even better in the full-size version.
-----ARACHNOPHOBES STOP-----
I've seen a few butterflies around, though most wouldn't stay still long enough for pictures, and it hasn't been anything very interesting. Mostly blues this year. The dill we planted failed to attract any swallowtail caterpillars, and very few butterflies of any kind, which was disappointing, though it may be that the cool, wet early summer depressed the numbers of butterflies in general.

I think this is a pearl crescent butterfly (Phyciodes tharos), though there are so many small orange and brown butterflies out there that I'm not confident about it. The plant is Haworthia limifolia var. ubomboensis.
I did manage to get a couple pictures of one swallowtail, though, at the ex-job.

Female eastern black swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes)? Plant is some Echinacea variety; I didn't check the tag.

Great year for bees, though. Lately I've been seeing mostly bumblebees, but I've seen at least four different species of bee over the course of the summer, and I'm probably forgetting a few.

Probably the less said about caterpillars, the better, but there is one that I thought was interesting. I found it on the Portulaca in early July.

I spent a long time at What's That Bug?, looking through their butterfly and moth caterpillar archives, but didn't see many pictures that were substantially similar, and the few that were similar were for caterpillars not actually found in Iowa. So I have no idea. (I considered submitting the photos to WTB, but they sounded kind of swamped with submissions already, and it's not like this is an emergency or anything.) But it's kind of cool-looking, as caterpillars go.

Finally, yes, there are grasshoppers (most likely the differential grasshopper, Melanoplus differentialis) around as well. They seem to be particularly fond of the Swiss chard (Beta vulgaris ssp. cicla 'Bright Lights'). Which is good, I guess. I mean, something ought to be. We tried sauteeing it with some other greens, early in the summer. It wasn't terrible, but it didn't leave us with any particular desire to do it again. So we designated it an ornamental and haven't touched it since. And it's doing a great job being ornamental.

-

¹ Why? Well, it was an unusually wet spring, which I'd think would have to be good for frogs. There's also been some habitat disruption in the area -- some kind of pond or sewage lagoon or something got filled in. Though I don't think that was this year. I'm pretty hazy about the details.
It could be helping, too, that when the rain stopped falling in early August, we let the grass go dormant and stopped mowing. In previous years, we have watered parts of it instead. And I think we've always mowed, until this year. Which if you think about it has some implications for the frog population. (CUT TO: Miss Piggy, crying "KERMIEEEEE!!!!!!" as she sinks to her knees.)
² To a disturbing degree: there is often a crowd of them gathered on the light fixture above our front door. As we don't use the front door very often, this hasn't been dangerous yet, but it's unsettling, like driving past a convenience store and seeing a crowd of high-school boys loitering in its parking lot. There are also a lot of wasps between the back door of the house and the garage during the day. Again, they've never actually attacked us, but surely it's only a matter of time before I come whipping around the corner of the house with a huge plant and upset somebody. And they've even shown up in the house once, which was a fun day.
That said, if you can observe them at a remove, like in photographs or something, they're kind of neat. Though that's true of a lot of things.

Pretty picture: Echinacea NOID

Things have been really busy for the last few days, Sunday in particular, so there isn't much to blog about, and what there is isn't anywhere close to being ready to post.

I'm not thrilled about the situation, but things are what they are. Meanwhile, the Echinaceas are blooming. Not our Echinaceas: we don't have any. But everybody else's. You know what I mean.

The Very Slow and Occasionally Sticky Inferno

So here's what's been going on.

Watering the plants has always been time-consuming and tedious, but it got worse in April. I've been watering almost everything in the house on a 14-day rotation. A lot of the plants would prefer more frequent checks than that, but 14 days is what I'm able to do, so they either live with getting watered every 14 days, or they die, or I make a special exception for them and check them every seven days. Previously, the special exception category was limited to about 10-15 plants on a small table in the plant room, but in April, I decided that about 500 plants in the basement also needed to be getting checked every 7 days, because a lot of them were seedlings or newish cuttings or plants that are just really drought-sensitive, and they wouldn't survive if I tried to keep them on the 14-day schedule.

What this has meant is that instead of checking about 1000-1050 plants every 14 days, I was suddenly checking about 1500-1600 plants every 14 days. So I took the most tedious and time-consuming part of the hobby and made it like 50% worse, basically.

And because of the extra work, I thought to myself at some point in May or June or probably both: I bet I'm never going to be lying on my deathbed thinking, "Gee, I wish I'd spent more time watering plants." And as I started mailing out plants to people I was selling to or trading with, I started fantasizing about how I could scale back the collection in a way that didn't involve outright killing anything, because that always makes me feel bad.

Open this in its own tab and you can even see its disgusting little legs.
And then the scaling back started to happen, in the most literal way possible: I started finding scale insects on the plants. One plant at the end of March. A handful at the beginning of May. And then at the end of June, the floodgates opened and I was finding scale everywhere:

1 Alpinia zerumbet variegata (plant room; 31 March; discarded)
3 Alworthia 'Black Gem' (basement; 1 May; discarded)
1 Aloe NOID (basement; 8 May; discarded)
1 Albuca bracteata (basement; 28 May; treated)
1 Strelitzia reginae (plant room; early June?; treated)
1 Aloe polyphylla (basement; 26 June; discarded)
1 Philodendron squamiferum (living room; 27 June; treated)
1 Agave desmettiana, variegated (basement; 28 June; discarded)
1 Agave titanota (basement; 2 July; treated)
1 Agave americana (basement; 2 July; treated)
2 Agave 'Blue Glow' (basement; 2 July; treated)
2 Agave lophantha (basement; 2 July; treated)
3 Aloe vera (basement; 3 July; discarded)
3 Gasteraloe x beguinii (basement; 3 July; discarded)
1 Aloe x 'Silver Ridge' (basement; 3 July; discarded)
13 Alworthia 'Black Gem' (basement; 3 July; discarded)
5 Hoya polyneura (basement; 9 July; discarded)
1 Philodendron hederaceum micans (basement; 11 July; discarded)
1 Philodendron erubescens 'Red Emerald' (basement; 11 July; treated)
4 Pereskia aculeata var. godseffiana (basement; 12 July; discarded)
1 Ficus benjamina 'Black Diamond' (basement; 12 July; treated)
1 Hippeastrum 'Red Lion' x ? (basement; 16 July; discarded)
1 Hippeastrum 'Red Lion' x ? (basement; 23 July; treated)

I think there were three separate infestations here, based on what plants were affected and when I noticed.

The first plant, the Alpinia, was I think was a single isolated infestation: I don't know where the scale could have come from, since I hadn't brought anything new into that area, but the plant was stressed, so it's possible it had a low-grade infestation for a long time, and then it got a lot worse really fast when it got stressed.

Scale on the Alpinia.
The second infestation barely counts: somebody sent me a cutting in June that had some scale on it, but I found them pretty much immediately, and it wasn't very advanced, so I think that's not going to be a big deal either.

And then the third. I think it came in on an Aloe polyphylla I received in December as a gift, because the outbreaks have all been taking place on plants that had been grown near the plant in question at one point or another. This is the infestation that swept the basement, might still be sweeping it, and what's caused all the troubles.

It's now been a couple weeks since any new scale was spotted, so possibly the worst is over. For a while there, though, I'd have to throw out more plants every time I watered, and that was depressing as hell.

But did I let myself sink into despondency and depression? Hell, no! I took action! For a few plants that I suspected had been exposed, but which I couldn't find any scale on, I decided to get out there ahead of the infestation and spray neem oil on them, to stop the infestation before it became visible. Which sounds like a good idea, right?

Yes. Well. You know how the directions on neem oil say not to use it on plants that are in direct sun, or that will be exposed to sun within a few hours of application, and all that? They should probably also add fluorescent lights to that warning, because within 24 hours, I'd completely defoliated two small Euphorbia trigona cuttings, and produced a few bleached spots and several ominous dark brown blisters on my baby Agave victoriae-reginaes. The former have bounced back, but the latter look to be permanently disfigured:

Agave victoriae-reginae, neem damage.
Which was even more discouraging, not that I learned my lesson. I then sprayed a plant room Euphorbia milii and Pedilanthus tithymaloides with neem because there was some kind of fungus that had been growing on their leaves. The Euphorbia responded by dropping about 95% of its foliage, immediately. The Pedilanthus was less of a drama queen about it, and only lost about 30% of its leaves, over the space of a month. Either way, though.

Euphorbia milii, after neem oil treatment for fungus. It was technically a success, I suppose, in that I'm no longer even remotely concerned about the fungus. Probably what happens next here is that I take cuttings and start new plants, but I haven't tried that yet.
Also, some of the Agaves I treated with neem and stuck outside also bleached (no blistering, though); they'll probably come back inside again in the fall, because the scale is probably not a problem anymore, but it'll be sad regardless, since they looked better when they had scale but no sunburn: I didn't really have the time or means to try to ease them into the outdoor light, and we don't have much for shady spots.

So then I started sinking into despondency.

All this was happening on top of the usual plant attrition, too. Not saying I encourage it or anything, but it's normal for me to lose a plant here, a plant there, for various reasons over time, and this was an exceptionally good summer for that.

I finally had it with Crassula ovata 'Gollum' and threw the lot out, because they persisted in developing a stupid fungus (maybe the same fungus, maybe a different one; I have no idea) even though I told them not to, and I didn't have a way to make them stop if they weren't going to listen.

The Salvia elegans all dried out (even getting checked weekly, they still dried out!) and died, save for one, which had a round of spider mites and is only barely alive now.

The Aeschynanthus radicans all gave up due to underwatering.

I threw out most of the Gynura aurantiacas I had when became clear that nobody was ever going to want to buy one. This is something I should probably have learned last year, but I'm slow.

The Fatshedera x lizei got spider mites and was thrown out. In fairness, I should note that I'd been expecting that to happen for almost two years, so it should probably get some kind of posthumous medal.

One of the Hatioras ("Easter cactus") imploded, the way they do.

And so on.

It was basically like the plant collection had caught fire. A very slow, and occasionally sticky, inferno. Everything was sort of slowly falling apart: scale, drought, scorching, defoliation, 50% more watering to do, spider mites, and fungus. It also wasn't getting any better. I had no way to know what plants might go bad next. There wasn't much I could do about it. And when I tried to do something about it, I mostly just made things worse.

The upshot of all this being that for about two or three weeks, I basically hated my plants. I didn't want to think about them, talk about them, or take pictures of them, and I sure as hell didn't want to water them, because the surest way to find something horrible hiding in your plant collection is to pick them up and look at them. Which you have to do, in order to water the way I water. (I still did take care of them, of course, because I recognized that I'd probably like them again eventually, and that there was no point punishing the healthy plants upstairs for the scale infestations of the plants downstairs. I just hated doing so more than usual.)

Echinacea 'PowWow Wild Berry,' at the ex-job, with what I believe to be aster yellows disease. PATSP has an official celebratory flower (Gazanias), so it seems only appropriate that PATSP should have an official flower of depression (It's pretty amazing that I've gotten by without an official depression flower for four and a half years, honestly.), and this was kind of the best I could come up with. My apologies to any Echinacea fans in the audience.
It's now been a couple weeks since I've found a new scale infestation. (New mealybugs as of last Wednesday, alas, but the scale seems to have slowed down.) In the last couple weeks, the plant collection has done two big things which I am choosing to interpret as apologies too. I won't tell you what those are yet, but there should be posts about them in the relatively near future. So we're getting back to the point where I'm able to appreciate plants again, somewhat, but I'd still rather not spend a lot of time thinking about them.

The blog, consequently, will be a bit up in the air for a while. I'm officially no longer on hiatus, but I'm probably not going to be posting very often, and I'll probably only be doing that when something exceptionally cool happens. And I'll keep going like that until . . . something changes and I start doing something else, I guess. Your guess is pretty much as good as mine right now.

Pretty picture: Echinacea 'Virgin'

I'm not all that impressed by Echinacea in general. Unlike certain people, I think the weird cultivars have more going for them, just by virtue of not being just another in a long line of vaguely daisy-like plants. Nothing against daisies, but, you know, I've seen them before: I'm not impressed.

("It is not modern enough, the sound the wind makes stirring a meadow of daisies: the mind cannot shine following it." -Louise Glück, "Daisies," in The Wild Iris)

Also I'm not nuts about Echinacea because I don't like how they poke me when I'm trying to move them around or groom them or whatever. But I suppose they're better than some things.